The Eduardo Saverin Question

May 18, 2012

RUSH: Eduardo Saverin, one of the original Facebook founders, holds, what, 3% of the company now, still makes him a billionaire. Eduardo Saverin’s family fled his native land, I believe that’s Brazil, not sure. His family came to the United States to escape oppression wherever they were. Eduardo Saverin goes to Harvard, meets Zuckerberg. They start Facebook. He becomes a billionaire. Eduardo Saverin moves to Singapore. Last week Eduardo Saverin renounced his American citizenship because of taxes. The capital gains tax, when this IPO goes and his share value is actually monetized and not just on paper, will be something like… it’s not right in front of me, but I think the tax that Saverin would owe will be something like 64, $68 million.

And Eduardo Saverin said, “To heck with it.” He’s not a native born American, his family moved here. He’s in Singapore, and, by the way, he’s a pretty big guy in Singapore. He runs around all the clubs. He’s in the gossip columns over there. He’s a pretty hot character, likes it, young guy, has the world in the palm of his hand. He doesn’t want to pay the tax, so he renounces his citizenship to avoid the taxes. Chuck-U Schumer and the Democrats have decided they’re not gonna put up with this, so they are going to pass a law, a bill of attainder essentially, which is gonna punish somebody for actions they’ve already taken that weren’t against the law, and bills of attainder are not legal for the most part. But a big debate has arisen, and I wonder what you think about it.

Is Eduardo Saverin a coward? Is he abandoning his responsibilities as a citizen in avoiding these taxes? Did he stay here long enough to truly remarkably benefit from America and then in the moment of truth, when the time came to pay for it, Eduardo Saverin’s out of there, or outta here, and then renouncing his citizenship. From what I read, a lot of blogs where all the people think they’re really smart, Eduardo Saverin’s taking it pretty hard, taking a lot of hits. People are not approving of what he’s doing, walking out on his country, abandoning his country, particularly in his country’s time of need. The country could really use the $64 million. Other people say, “Ah, ah, ah, ah, Eduardo Saverin is just a microcosm of American business.” Moving out of country, establishing overseas operations to avoid high taxes. Got the highest corporate tax rate in the world now at 35%.

Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, had a meeting with Boehner this week. Nobody knows what it was about, but everybody’s guessing that Cook went in there and said, (paraphrasing) “Look, we need your help in supporting a tax holiday. We’d love to repatriate our foreign funds, but we don’t want to pay these exorbitant taxes in the process. So we’d be happy to bring that money back and put it into circulation here in the US economy, but not at the current tax rates.” And people are dumping all over Apple and a number of other US corporations for doing this. So the question becomes, as far as I can tell, or as far as I’m concerned, the question is, is Eduardo Saverin and all these other US corporations, are they guilty of poor citizenship, or are they simply reacting entirely normal to tax policy?

It is clear that it is tax policies, and these tax policies, high taxes on the rich, on millionaires, that Joe Biden says, “Oh, no, we believe in capitalism. God, man, why, it’s what built the country.” But his president’s out there demonizing successful people every day, targeting successful people every day, running a presidential campaign based on class warfare, trying to get the 99% of the country who are not in the top 1% to hate the 1%, to literally despise ’em. It seems to me that it was the tax policy that came first. The tax policy that came first that’s chasing people like Eduardo Saverin and other companies out of this country in increasing numbers.

The people who are saying Eduardo Saverin doesn’t have the right to do this, he’s shirking his responsibility as a citizen, this is a cowardly thing to do. Well, I left New York state for the same reason. Now, I didn’t have to renounce citizenship, but I left New York state for the same reason. I moved to a state with no state income tax. I’m sure that people think that I am not a patriotic New Yorker. I spent eight years there. I paid my dues, and they still follow me. Every year I get audited under the premise I’m lying to them about the number of days every year I live and work in New York, which are zero. I have to prove it 14 different ways every day of the year, where I am, where I say I was. And I can tell you, I left New York for tax reasons. I’m the first one to admit it, and I’m not the only one. Talk to Trump. Trump will tell you he knows a lot of other people have done it, too.

So if it’s a more favorable tax haven that you can find elsewhere and you go there, why is it automatically that you are unpatriotic? Why is it automatically that you are a coward, that you are not paying your fair share? It’s this whole class envy thing rearing its head again. So I just wanted to throw it out there.